First Hop Redundancy Protocol (“FHRP”) allows for transparent fail-over at the first-hop IP router. An FHRP group is created with multiple routers or switches. At least one switch in the group is an active router, and another router in the group is a standby router. There may also be one or more listening routers in the group. The group may be assigned a single virtual IP address, which is provided to each end user associated with the group as a default gateway address. The FHRP provides redundancy, because in the event of a failure of the active router, the standby router, or one of the listening routers, can take over for the active router.
At the layer-2/layer-3 boundary, in current networks, FHRP as described above is used to provide gateway redundancy. In FabricPath networks, there may be 16 or even 32 gateways present in the layer-2 network. In such scenarios, FHRP as described above may not scale or provide dynamic load balancing.